


Belle's Brand New Bedroom

by extree



Series: Dark Castle [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-30
Updated: 2014-04-30
Packaged: 2018-01-21 08:08:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1543736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/extree/pseuds/extree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Belle finally gets a proper room in the Dark Castle, but there's a bit of a decor problem in the middle of the night. A little bit of Dark Castle fluff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Belle's Brand New Bedroom

Belle lay on her bed and tried to come to terms with the thoroughly underwhelming state of her new bedroom. The room was mostly grey and empty save for the large bed, a single lit candle on a night stand, and a wardrobe. The windows were huge and unforgivably bare with no curtains; but at least it wasn’t the dungeon – the dungeon Belle found inexplicably locked when she had finished with her work and meant to turn in for the night. She’d had to walk back up to where Rumplestiltskin, rather predictably, was still spinning away at his wheel in the main room of the Dark Castle and ask him why the door wouldn’t budge. Then, abruptly, his head had snapped up and his hands fluttered about as he stood and motioned for her to follow her up one of the stone staircases, muttering something about needing the cell in the dungeon for something far more important than her, earning him an eye-roll behind his back. He had led her to the very room she was now trying to settle down in and had been about to leave her there with no explanation when Belle stopped him.

“What’s this?” she had asked then, prompting him to halt and spin around to face her with a look of utter incomprehension.

“Your new room, dearie,” he’d replied in a tone of voice that suggested he had assumed that little fact to be evident. Belle had blinked at him a few times. That was it?

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I forgot.”

“You forgot?”

“Yes. I’ve been very busy.”

Doubtful, Belle had thought to herself. He had done nothing but spin all day, looking dour and barely sparing her a look or a word.

“Sure. Good night, then, Rumplestiltskin,” she’d said.

“Yes, yes. Night.”

And so now she was here, in this room with vaulted ceilings, an unlit fireplace and impressive arched windows which, scooting off the bed and moving closer, she had to admit gave her a much better view than her four stone walls back in the dungeon. The mountains were so beautiful in the moonlight, Belle decided she could do without drapes if she really had to. For now. Maybe in the morning she would ask Rumplestiltskin whether he had any curtains to spare, if he wasn’t in too strange a mood.

As she watched the clouds move slow past the low hanging moon, Belle idly wondered whether Rumplestiltskin really did need her cell in the dungeon for something else. She had a sneaking suspicion that, in truth, he had just wanted to give her a proper room after all this time. But then, if the cell merely stood empty now, why would he have made it inaccessible? In the months she’d known him, Rumplestiltskin had never done anything for no reason whatsoever. But then, there was a first time for everything, wasn’t there? It hardly mattered, anyway. She had her room, now, and even though it could do with a splash of color and perhaps a few more pillows on the bed, Belle was glad. Forever was an awful long time to spend in a room without a view.

As for Rumplestiltskin, well, Belle was pleased to notice he’d been sprucing himself up, too. A little less callous in her presence, and a little more susceptible to her pleas for lenience for those poor unsuspecting souls who got themselves on his bad side. Belle laughed softly at her own phrasing as she walked past the fireplace, fingertips brushing against the stone mantel. The Dark One’s bad side. It sounded ridiculous – she was well aware of that – and she knew that others would think her insane for implying that he was not all darkness and cruelty. But then, they didn’t see him with her, did they? They didn’t hear his voice – his real voice – or see his pleased smiles after he’d made her laugh and mistakenly thought she wasn’t looking. And certainly not the shy looks he’d been giving her recently, after she’d embraced him in the forest and pulled his disguise up just a little bit. Nor did they know about the flimsy excuses he made to visit her in the library; telling her he needed some tome or other for whatever reason, proceeding to take an awful long time to find it, chatting with her and making her smile throughout, leaving without the book and then rushing back up the stairs to retrieve it with a poor attempt at a look of complete indifference. No, they saw none of that.

She was well and truly lost in her thoughts (her dreamy smile would have been proof of that, had someone been there to witness it) when without warning, her candle flickered out and left an odd purple smoke trail barely lit by the remaining spot of burning brightness on the candle’s wick, and then the room was enveloped by darkness. A strong gust of wind rushed through the room at the same time, and it was not quite howling but there were strange noises of something fluttering and something else creaking that were scary enough on their own. Where the faint moonlight was pale and white before, there was now a dark purple tower of smoke, and that was the last thing she saw before she clenched her eyes shut. Belle wrapped one arm around her middle, then pressed her chin to her chest and wrapped the other around her head protectively, fearing that whatever it was that was rushing around the room might come crashing into her head and knock her out cold. She was breathing fast and shallow, her heart beating madly, but she forced her chest to expand and filled her lungs with all the air she could muster, then screamed:

“Rumplestiltskin!”

And in an instant he appeared by her side in a whirl of purple smoke, an arm before her chest in a protective gesture, moving to stand in front of her with a determined stride and shielding her with his body. At the snap of his fingers, the room was lit in the warm glowing light of candles and lamps Belle knew for a fact weren’t there before, and with a sizzle and a whoosh, the fireplace roared into life – tall flames licking at the stone mantel and casting furious dancing shadows on the wall opposite for a short but intense moment before dying down and settling to a calm crackle. After scanning the room and failing to find any immediate threat, Rumplestiltskin spun around to face his maid, concern and confusion both clearly present in his eyes.

“Are you alright?”

“I- I don’t know, I- I was about to go to bed, and then there was all this smoke and noise, and...”

She had started out panicked, voice tense and higher in her alert state, but then the word ‘smoke’ left her mouth and she had started to trail off. Smoke. Purple smoke. The kind that usually accompanied the Dark One’s acts of magic. With him at her side and the room lit, Belle felt her heart slow to a slightly less frantic pace in her chest.

“Rumplestiltskin? What just happened?”

Belle could see him relax, shoulders dropping, a sigh escaping his lips. But he didn’t quite look her in the eye; instead his gaze fell slowly to the floor and he clasped his hands in front of him.

“Furnishings,” he muttered.

“Furnishings happened?” asked Belle, a hint of concern in her voice, now. Lower.

“I forgot the furnishings,” he muttered, eyes glued to his boots, hair falling in front of his face.

“That was you? You conjured up all of these things just now? You nearly scared me to death!”

“I’m... I thought you’d be asleep by now, so I just... And then I heard you scream, and I thought you might be in trouble. An intruder. Or crushed under a bookcase, maybe.”

He was still staring at his boots, so Belle took the time to look around the room, taking a few steps. Perhaps it was the glow of the lamps and the candles, but the room looked nothing like the grey, bare castle chamber Rumplestiltskin had presented her with earlier that evening. The bed, for one, was simply gorgeous, now. A beautiful dark blue sea of silky covers, adorned with golden thread embroidered into an intricate, delicate pattern; plush pillows of varying colors and textures strewn about the head; curtains around the dark wooden frame and a rug of warm colors underneath where before there lay only cold stone. Two night stands with beautifully carved, twisting legs of the same dark wood now stood at each side of the bed, an oil lamp and a stack of books on each. The windows were no longer bare, framed by drapes that pooled into a velvety heap of fabric on the floor. In between the two arched windows now stood a chaise longue, looking soft and inviting, a claw-footed side table with an ornate brass candelabrum nearby.

“It’s beautiful,” Belle murmured, her smile curling into a bright grin, eyes wide as if to take in as much of the splendor she possibly could.

“You like it?” came his uncharacteristically quiet voice, low and wavering like the candle flame flickered as Belle walked past it to move closer to him.

“I adore it.”

“Are you certain? I can change the colors, if you like.”

Belle tilted her head to the side a little bit and bit down on her smile. The Dark One, asking her if she would like him to change the color scheme of her brand new bedroom. He looked strangely boyish, tentatively pleased with himself for just a brief moment until he must have caught her amusement and realized he’d forgotten to be fearsome and uncaring.

“I mean, I don’t want you to come complaining, later,” he hastened to add, straightening his spine to stand upright and cast the secret softness from his body. Oh, but it was still there in his eyes, no matter how hard he tried, and the artificial harshness of his voice wasn’t nearly enough to make up for that. Belle smiled, chuckled under her breath and gave him a certain look with slightly narrowed eyes to tell him that he wasn’t fooling her, no – not at all.

“I won’t. It’s perfect, Rumplestiltskin.”

He frowned, nodded, clasped his hands behind his back and turned on his heels to head towards the door. And she certainly wasn’t thinking at the time, and she would have loved to know what exactly had possessed her in that moment, but Belle suddenly found herself reaching out and putting a hand on his upper arm before he was out of her reach. She was completely and utterly prepared to close her fingers around the fabric of his shirt if that wasn’t enough to stop him from walking away, but the simple touch was enough to freeze him in place, and he slowly turned around.

His brow furrowed, lips slightly parted in unvoiced surprise, Rumplestiltskin watched Belle’s arm drop to her side again, then looked up to meet her gaze. There was something she’d wanted to say – she could have sworn there was – but there was something strange in between them all of the sudden, and as she breathed in sharp, she swallowed it down and felt it settle hot in her belly. He was still staring at her, his intriguing, ever-changing eyes locked with hers. Mouth desert dry, Belle drew her bottom lip in and flitted her tongue over it before gathering her words and speaking.

“Thank you,” she offered. It was almost a whisper – it felt like the moment demanded soft tones and carefully chosen words, and she didn’t have the heart to deny it. His gaze danced over her face, now, and Belle knew, somehow simply knew that it was her mouth his eyes kept being drawn to. The thought tugged at the corners of her lips to curl them into a little smile, and with that his eyes snapped right back up to hers and stayed there, just a little bit wider. A shame, Belle thought. She didn’t mind. But how do you tell someone that it’s alright; you quite like it when they look at you like... like that, without actually telling them outright? You simply don’t. You can’t. Belle had yet to read a single book (well, a decent, proper book she could admit to having read without blushing, that is) in which an author had managed to do that.

“No need to thank me for that,” he replied, breaking eye contact to look over her shoulder instead. The harshness of his voice had gone; it was his regular voice again, his evening voice as he sat at his wheel and talked to her, telling her stories and describing far off lands, weaving words into sentences and sentences into landscapes and soothing her with pleasant low tones. Belle sensed something underneath these words, however. Something he preferred to leave unvoiced. It felt an awful lot like shame.

“Then can I thank you for rushing in here to protect me from unknown harm without you making some sort of quip about safeguarding your investment?”

He looked at her again, head tilted to the side subtly, almost imperceptibly. He swallowed.

“You’re welcome.”

Belle grinned and gave him a nod. With a little half smile playing at the corners of his mouth, Rumplestiltskin tipped an imaginary hat and vanished from Belle’s room, leaving her with that grin still on her face and no hopes of falling asleep with that strange, fluttery feeling in the pit of her stomach. At least, that’s what she was thinking to herself before she crawled into her lovely new bed and lay her head on the impossibly comfortable pillows, finding herself feeling so incredibly safe that it didn’t take her very long to fall asleep after all.

…

When Belle made her way down to the main room of the castle the next morning, Rumplestiltskin was already at his wheel. If it hadn’t been for the new set of clothes he was wearing, Belle might have thought he had stayed there through the night.

“Good morning, Rumplestiltskin.”

“Good morning,” he replied, looking up briefly to give her an acknowledging look, but nothing more. So he was still in this mood of his, was he?

“Would you like me to prepare breakfast, now?”

“No need. Not for me, I mean.”

“Alright. I’ll go and eat, then.”

“Yes, yes, very well.”

And she had turned and meant to walk towards the kitchen, but a thought had seized hold of her and stopped her dead in her tracks. She would ask him. About the dungeon. Ask him what he was keeping in there, if anything at all.

“Rumplestiltskin?” she started, walking towards him with careful but determined steps. He didn’t look up from his wheel, but it turned a little faster the closer she got, Belle noted.

“Yes?”

“What are you keeping in my cell?”

And the wheel stopped. Nothing but the sound of her footsteps as she approached him, until she stood close, right by his side. His head inclined, his hair fell over his face.

“Nothing.”

“But you told me you needed the cell for something else.”

“I lied. It stands empty.”

“But then why did you lock it?”

He tilted his chin up to look at her, and the expression on his face was something Belle hadn’t seen before. His brows knitted, that hint of shame that laced his voice the night before was now visible in his eyes.

“Because you needn’t set foot in there ever again.”

He blinked at her a few times, then returned his attention to the wheel and brought it into motion once more. Belle stood there and felt the strange fluttery feeling in her stomach well up again, only this time it rose up her body, climbed and climbed until it rushed to her head, then fell down again and poured through her arms, hands and fingers as they reached out to touch Rumplestiltskin’s face, turning his head towards her just a little bit so she could dip and press her lips to his cheek in a soft kiss.

The wheel slowed to a squeaky halt. The spindle had fallen to the floor. Belle pulled back and felt heat at her neck, ascending and threatening to stain her cheeks red. Rumplestiltskin’s lips were slightly parted, that pained look on his face nowhere to be found. Instead there were wide open eyes that blinked slowly at her, and a brow wiped clear of worry.

“I, uh, I’ll go and have breakfast now,” Belle almost stuttered, walking backwards towards the kitchen with a slightly awkward grin. She was more than a little flustered, and she knew it was obvious. But Rumplestiltskin sat motionless, stared at her as she made her stilted exit. She turned and meant to rush out of the room, but his voice calling her name slowed her. Swallowing, willing the blush on her face to go back whence it came (and failing horribly at this attempt,) Belle faced him.

“Yes?”

“I meant to ask, did you sleep well last night?”

“I slept really, really well,” Belle replied, and she returned his little smile.

“Good. Perhaps you won’t miss quite as many spots when you dust the rooms, now,” he teased, impish voice having made its return.

Belle narrowed her eyes and smirked, shaking her head softly.

“Sure, Rumplestiltskin. Whatever you say.”

From the kitchen, as she sat at the table in front of her morning meal, Belle heard the squeaking from the wheel and a softly hummed tune, and she smiled into her cup of tea.


End file.
